Re: Lady Liberty

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

Well, the French are demanding we give them back the Statue of Liberty because
we have borders and enforce them now, which means we no longer value liberty.
Or something. So the week is starting off great.

I don't want to give the Statue of Liberty to France, but I do think we should
remove that dumb poem about the 'huddled masses' that leftists love to cite
when arguing that America, alone among nations, should have no borders, and
send that over to the Caliphate of France. They can attach it to the Eiffel
Tower or something. America is not an international homeless shelter.

Oddly, when America was open to immigrants from shithole countries, it
wasn't an international homeless shelter. People went right to work and
paid for their own housing out of their wages.

But there were no federal laws about who could be employed and who
couldn't, and there was no enumeration prerequisite for employment in
order to administer a federal welfare, er, pension scheme.

My grandfather (mother's father) and his younger brother were among the
"huddled masses" along with a hell of a lot of other Jews, Slavs, and
others from eastern, central, and southern Europe. And because they left
the part of Poland that Russia had grabbed, that met both the descriptions
of leaving a "shithole country" and "yearning to breathe free".

They were 12 and 10 when they left; my grandfather would have been
conscripted into the Russian army had he not left. They were 14 and 12
by the time they made it to America having worked their way across
Europe, staying with relatives in England for a time, them crossing the
Atlantic to get to Montreal then getting to Chicago.

I grew up in the suburbs and I don't see how I would have been tough
enough to do anything like that.

Your disagreements are with homelessness and with the French for being
obnoxious and hypocritical, not with immigration.